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Imagine if you had the luxury of employing a full-time professional whose sole duty was to ensure optimal performance and continuous uptime for your entire IT infrastructure. Someone with the unique insight to reduce energy costs and improve efficiencies. Someone who could proactively plan a power evolution path and identify potential bottlenecks. Someone possessing the expertise to accurately forecast the health and status of your critical systems at all times.

Now that would certainly be a salary worth paying, right?

Now imagine being able to achieve this invaluable peace of mind without ever sorting through a resume, thanks to a solution that doesn’t even require you to dispense health benefits, vacation time or sick leave. Sound too good to be true? Thankfully, with an effective power management and monitoring system, it’s not.

In this new 8-part series, we will explore the multitude of benefits that can be reaped from deploying such a solution. Blog topics will include an overview on why you need power monitoring; the features and advantages of modern technologies; the different pieces of your infrastructure that can be monitored; the type of information that can be gathered and how it is communicated; how to build an effective power monitoring strategy; monitoring in virtualized environments; and how some solutions can even help you maintain business continuity and minimize operating expenses. Along the way, you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, which we will respond to in the eighth and final installment of the series.

There’s no denying that today’s organizations face significant challenges in managing their IT environments — from ever-escalating power requirements and utility costs, to the unique demands of blade and virtualized environments, to the ongoing threat of power failures, sags and surges. Yet with the right monitoring tools in place, companies can gain a comprehensive, real-time view of their whole network or facility.

Even more, power monitoring and management solutions are available for organizations of every size, enabling IT personnel to remotely monitor a single uninterruptible power system (UPS), up to an entire enterprise network featuring an array of devices and components from different manufacturers.

The functionality available in many modern power monitoring solutions delivers a broad spectrum of advantages that contribute to optimized power, enhanced efficiency, improved data protection and lower overall costs. The right solution can help an organization to:

Safeguard its entire power infrastructure

Proactively manage power quality for higher availability and extended equipment life

Balance workloads for more efficient energy usage

Allocate servers to respond to changing energy conditions

Improve energy efficiencies and power usage effectiveness (PUE)

In our next installment, Larry Dixon will discuss the ways power monitoring can help IT managers overcome some of their most significant challenges, including skyrocketing power consumption and energy costs, asset vulnerabilities, the host of lurking uptime threats, and the expectations to do more with fewer available resources. In the meantime, let us know if you have a specific question about power monitoring and management by typing it below.